Legibility | Kaelan

States need to see in order to control. That’s the core of James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State (1998). Complex, local, illegible systems get flattened into simple, standardized, legible ones.

Forests become timber plantations. Cities become grids. Local names become standardized surnames. Traditional agriculture becomes collectivized farms.

The simplification makes the system visible to administrators. But the complexity being erased often was the system.

Scott identifies four conditions for planning disasters:

State-imposed administrative ordering
High-modernist ideology (basically: “we know better, and science proves it”)
Authoritarian power to implement the plan
Civil society too weak to resist

When you get all four, you get things like Soviet collectivization (millions dead) or Tanzanian villagization (millions displaced). The planners genuinely believed they were helping.

Brasília is the architectural version. Designed in the 1950s according to Le Corbusier’s principles: wide boulevards, separated functions, everything visible from above. The city works for cars. It’s terrible for humans.

The unplanned parts — the squatter settlements that emerged around the edges — provide what the design couldn’t. Shops at street level. Mixed use. Human-scale disorder.

The favelas are illegible. They’re also livable.

I think about this whenever I see org charts. The chart shows reporting relationships. But how work actually happens — who talks to whom, who trusts whom, where real decisions get made — that’s not on the chart.

Same with specs versus code. The spec describes what the system should do. What it actually does is in the code, which is messy and full of workarounds for things the spec didn’t anticipate.

Legibility is useful. But it’s always a model. When you optimize for the map, you break the territory.

Go Deeper

Books

Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott — The definitive treatment. Dense but essential.
The Art of Not Being Governed by James C. Scott — Scott’s sequel on people who escaped state legibility.
Two Cheers for Anarchism by James C. Scott — Shorter, more accessible.

Essays

“A Big Little Idea Called Legibility” by Venkatesh Rao — The blog post that introduced Scott’s ideas to tech culture. Start here for the quick version.